Dr. Karl Pillemer

And one piece of advice that came through from many of them is when you're choosing a mate, watch how your prospective partner plays games.

So I interviewed— What do you mean by that?

Like cards or basketball or all of it?

When you're actually playing a game, like when they're doing like a leisure activity, like playing a game, and sort of make it concrete—

One of my interviewees, who was Dominican, from the Dominican Republic, if you go to many social clubs or anywhere where there are lots of Dominicans, you will see people playing dominoes.

Yeah.

And they play very cutthroat dominoes.

And she said, I observed the guy I was interested in.

I saw he was competitive, but he was a gracious loser.

I saw there was someone else who said, in a Chinese senior center, I watched my future wife play mahjong.

And I could see how she related to the other people.

And somebody else said, I tried to play something like a trivia, some game with my guy I was interested in, and he threw the board up in the air and stormed out of the room.

So watching how your partner operates, again, being the researcher, so that was one concrete thing.

The other piece of advice I took to heart

is if you're having a lot of serious arguments, you find there's a pattern to arguments.

Rather than therapy, the cure might be a sandwich.

Because my wife and I, though we'd be traveling and we'd forget to eat,

And our argument, like who chose the bad hotel or why we got there after the museum closed, would be unbelievably intense until we realized that we were hungry.

And there's good research on this, Mel, showing that you should not argue when you're hungry.

And so one of the things the elders said, like one of their little lessons, is if you're having an intractable argument, get something to eat and see what happens.